Windows 10 Guest stuck at boot

[sklirg]

Hello there.

Up until today, I've been running a Windows 10 VM on my arch linux machine without any problems. After rebooting the guest today after having let it be on during the night (and it dropping network connectivity), it simply would not start. It gets to the Windows 10 "spinning circle" during boot, where the Windows 10 logo is displayed, and suddenly the spinning circle stop spinning and nothing happens.

I tried looking at the logs but I I'm not sure where to look or what to look for.

Host information:
* Lenovo ThinkPad T470, 16 GB RAM with an Intel i5-7300U.
* Running arch linux (4.12.3-1-ARCH)

Arch packages installed:

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virtualbox 5.1.26-1
virtualbox-ext-oracle 5.1.26-1
virtualbox-guest-iso 5.1.26-1
virtualbox-host-modules-arch 5.1.26-2

Virtualbox version: 5.1.26

Guest information:
The guest is a "regular Win 10 installation" with only Visual Studio, dotnet and some android sdks installed in.
When setting it up I used the default Win 10 64-bit template, but gave it 2 CPUs instead of the default 1. To try to solve the problem I've searched a bit and tried to disable acceleration, enable 3D and 2D acceleration, set paravirtualization interface to Legacy instead of Default.

Guest additions are installed in the guest.

Specs (full specs are provided below)
* CPUs: 2
* RAM: 4 GB

The last thing I can remember which might have affected any of this is to turn on Bidirectional Drag'nDrop sharing, which when I first tried it errored out with a "It seems like a drag 'n drop action is already in progress", and a lot of new directories in my home directory on the host.

I also installed VBox 5.1.26 today, so the last time I booted the machine I must've been on VBox 5.1.24.

Here is the full VMInfo for the win 10 VM:

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Name:            Windows10
Groups:          /
Guest OS:        Windows 10 (64-bit)
UUID:            bc2500af-1225-419a-bf3f-7f471987e6e5
Config file:     /home/sklirg/VirtualBox VMs/Windows10/Windows10.vbox
Snapshot folder: /home/sklirg/VirtualBox VMs/Windows10/Snapshots
Log folder:      /home/sklirg/VirtualBox VMs/Windows10/Logs
Hardware UUID:   bc2500af-1225-419a-bf3f-7f471987e6e5
Memory size:     4096MB
Page Fusion:     off
VRAM size:       128MB
CPU exec cap:    100%
HPET:            off
Chipset:         piix3
Firmware:        BIOS
Number of CPUs:  2
PAE:             off
Long Mode:       on
Triple Fault Reset: off
APIC:            on
X2APIC:          off
CPUID Portability Level: 0
CPUID overrides: None
Boot menu mode:  message and menu
Boot Device (1): Floppy
Boot Device (2): DVD
Boot Device (3): HardDisk
Boot Device (4): Not Assigned
ACPI:            on
IOAPIC:          on
BIOS APIC mode:  APIC
Time offset:     0ms
RTC:             local time
Hardw. virt.ext: on
Nested Paging:   on
Large Pages:     off
VT-x VPID:       on
VT-x unr. exec.: on
Paravirt. Provider: Default
Effective Paravirt. Provider: HyperV
State:           powered off (since 2017-07-29T12:08:07.640000000)
Monitor count:   1
3D Acceleration: off
2D Video Acceleration: off
Teleporter Enabled: off
Teleporter Port: 0
Teleporter Address: 
Teleporter Password: 
Tracing Enabled: off
Allow Tracing to Access VM: off
Tracing Configuration: 
Autostart Enabled: off
Autostart Delay: 0
Default Frontend: 
Storage Controller Name (0):            SATA
Storage Controller Type (0):            IntelAhci
Storage Controller Instance Number (0): 0
Storage Controller Max Port Count (0):  30
Storage Controller Port Count (0):      3
Storage Controller Bootable (0):        on
SATA (0, 0): /home/sklirg/VirtualBox VMs/Windows10/Windows10.vdi (UUID: eca31b2b-dc4d-45ef-8d4d-819bb7277963)
SATA (1, 0): Empty
SATA (2, 0): /home/sklirg/VirtualBox VMs/Windows10/Windows10VSEnterprise.vdi (UUID: 22dae523-cc79-4200-b1d4-de1643ebac15)
NIC 1:           MAC: 0800275D3AE9, Attachment: NAT, Cable connected: on, Trace: off (file: none), Type: 82540EM, Reported speed: 0 Mbps, Boot priority: 0, Promisc Policy: deny, Bandwidth group: none
NIC 1 Settings:  MTU: 0, Socket (send: 64, receive: 64), TCP Window (send:64, receive: 64)
NIC 2:           disabled
NIC 3:           disabled
NIC 4:           disabled
NIC 5:           disabled
NIC 6:           disabled
NIC 7:           disabled
NIC 8:           disabled
Pointing Device: USB Tablet
Keyboard Device: PS/2 Keyboard
UART 1:          disabled
UART 2:          disabled
UART 3:          disabled
UART 4:          disabled
LPT 1:           disabled
LPT 2:           disabled
Audio:           enabled (Driver: PulseAudio, Controller: HDA, Codec: STAC9221)
Clipboard Mode:  Bidirectional
Drag and drop Mode: disabled
VRDE:            disabled
USB:             disabled
EHCI:            disabled
XHCI:            enabled

USB Device Filters:

Index:            0
Active:           yes
Name:             Nexus 5X
VendorId:         
ProductId:        
Revision:         
Manufacturer:     LGE
Product:          Nexus 5X
Remote:           
Serial Number:    

Index:            1
Active:           no
Name:             New Filter 1
VendorId:         
ProductId:        
Revision:         
Manufacturer:     
Product:          
Remote:           
Serial Number:    

Bandwidth groups:  <none>

Shared folders:  <none>

Video capturing:    not active
Capture screens:    0
Capture file:       /home/sklirg/VirtualBox VMs/Windows10/Windows10.webm
Capture dimensions: 1024x768
Capture rate:       512 kbps
Capture FPS:        25

Guest:

Configured memory balloon size:      0 MB

The log is from a VM "Start", and then waiting for a while (looks like 13 minutes according to the logs) and the issuing the Power Off command to the VM.

I've also tried to do a startup repair/diagnostic from Windows inside the VM. Windows reports it couldn't identify any problems, and the output of the diagnostic log (E:\Windows\System32\Logfiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt) is that it booted successfully in the diagnostic tests.

Anyone have any idea on what's wrong? Thanks in advance.

[mpack]

I don't see any sign of failure in the log. In fact it gets far enough into the boot to load and run the Guest Additions.

The only dubious thing I notice is that you have a dual core host and you allocated 2 cores to the VM, which doesn't leave a lot for the host. This certainly could cause background tasks on the host to slow to a crawl, especially if it actually needs to do something.

[sklirg]

I don't see any sign of failure in the log. In fact it gets far enough into the boot to load and run the Guest Additions.

Interesting. Do you have any suggestions on what I can try next?

The only dubious thing I notice is that you have a dual core host and you allocated 2 cores to the VM, which doesn't leave a lot for the host. This certainly could cause background tasks on the host to slow to a crawl, especially if it actually needs to do something.

Nice catch. I did try running it with 1 core as well, no change.

[Martin]

That's again another Win 10 guest slow problem report when running on a kaby lake notebook CPU.

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00:00:00.726018 CPUM: Matched host CPU INTEL 0x6/0x8e/0x9 Intel_Atom_Unknown with CPU DB entry 'Intel Pentium N3530 2.16GHz' (INTEL 0x6/0x37/0x8 Intel_Atom_Silvermont)
00:00:00.999428 Full Name:                       "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7300U CPU @ 2.60GHz"

But I don't remember if any of the others got solved.

[sklirg]

I found two threads that reported similar problems. Although it seemed like they actually could make the VMs boot.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=83337 and viewtopic.php?f=2&t=83384

They also reported having NVME disks. I tried to set the CPU profile to "Intel Core i5-7300U" using the modifyVM-command but received this response

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Info on guest CPU 'Intel Core i5-7300U' could not be found. Please, select a different CPU. (VERR_CPUM_DB_CPU_NOT_FOUND).

Do you have a suggestion on a similar CPU profile I could run that actually exists, to see if this is the problem? Or any other suggestions on what I could try?

[Martin]

I don't think that the CPU name detection has a technical relation to the problem. I just use it to recognize this new generation of systems.
My guess would rather be that this could be something related to the NVMe drive(r) usage in Windows 10.

[sklirg]

Okay.

I provisioned a new VM and could make that one boot, so I'm setting up my environment from scratch. That works with no problems, so the problem might be with the actual contents of the VM and not Virtualbox.

[sklirg]

After having set up everything I set up a shared folder with the Windows VM from the host. After that, the Windows VM bluescreened and wouldn't boot anymore. I tried to remove the shared folder, and the VM would still not boot.

Both VMs had shared drives set-up, but the first VM could actually boot with the shared folder the first time. Could this be the problem?

I attached logs of four boots;

0: The provisioning run. It had been up for an hour or so, but there should probably not be anything interesting here.
1: A clean reboot before setting up the shared folder (boot, shutdown)
2: A boot after setting up the shared folder (`/home/sklirg/Documents/shared_win102`) as an automatically mounted shared folder (blue screen during boot)
3: A boot after removing the shared folder again (blue screen during boot)

Thanks for the help so far.